Apple's iCloud Is Coming -- How Much Will It Cost? (AAPL)

Dan Frommer, provided by

Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Appleannounced today that CEO Steve Jobs will show off a new service called "iCloud" -- "Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering" -- next Monday at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. (Join us for live coverage!)

It's reasonable to assume that iCloud will be some sort of Internet-based storage service, potentially including music and movie syncing, and maybe supporting iOS apps, too. And maybe even photos, or even some of the MobileMe and iWork storage for email, calendars, docs, contacts, etc. It's all fair game.

But we're most curious about how much it's going to cost and who's going to pay for it.

Apple isn't historically known for giving away services for free. MobileMe is $99 per year or $149 per year for a family pack. Apple takes a 30% cut for App Store sales, some of which goes to pay for hosting and other iTunes services, like push notifications.

But it is competing with free, or at least "freemium."

Amazon, Dropbox, and others all offer some free cloud storage. Google gives away a bunch of mobile services on its phones (many of which are also compatible with iPhones and iPads).

And even Apple has started giving away some Internet services for free, such as "Find my iPhone."

Our best guess: A freemium model, where anyone can get their feet wet for free, and power users can buy more capacity for a monthly or annual fee. (Remember, this is still a weird concept for a lot of people, so Apple would be smart to give a low barrier to entry.)

Apple is known for keeping pricing simple, so we don't expect a lot of choices -- good, better, best. We'd expect subscriptions to start around $5 to $10 per month, and max out around $50 to $100 per month.

But it doesn't seem like something the company would give away completely for free, especially if it has to pay the record labels a bunch of money for music rights.

So expect to pay something for iCloud, if you get any real usage out of it.